ElePose: Unsupervised 3D Human Pose Estimation by Predicting Camera Elevation and Learning Normalizing Flows on 2D Poses

Human pose estimation from single images is a challenging problem that is typically solved by supervised learning. Unfortunately, labeled training data does not yet exist for many human activities since 3D annotation requires dedicated motion capture systems. Therefore, we propose an unsupervised approach that learns to predict a 3D human pose from a single image while only being trained with 2D pose data, which can be crowd-sourced and is already widely available. To this end, we estimate the 3D pose that is most likely over random projections, with the likelihood estimated using normalizing flows on 2D poses. While previous work requires strong priors on camera rotations in the training data set, we learn the distribution of camera angles which significantly improves the performance. Another part of our contribution is to stabilize training with normalizing flows on high-dimensional 3D pose data by first projecting the 2D poses to a linear subspace. We outperform the state-of-the-art unsupervised human pose estimation methods on the benchmark datasets Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP in many metrics.